What “56 Up” Reveals

The other night, I spent two and a half hours in the company of a group of people I’ve known and cared about for most of my life: the dozen or so subjects of Michael Apted’s landmark “7 Up” documentary series. The series began in 1964, with what was intended to be a one-off documentary about the disparate lives of British seven-years-olds from different economic backgrounds. They included a working-class schoolgirl whose ambition extended to working at Woolworths; a junior toff from a prep school who read the Financial Times and anticipated with equanimity his eventual admission to Cambridge; and an irresistible lad from the suburbs of Liverpool who aspired to be an astronaut or, failing that, a bus driver. Apted, who worked as a researcher on that first film when he was in his early twenties, had the bright idea, seven years later, of revisiting the subjects; he’s been back to check in on them every seven years since. The eighth, and most recent, installment, “56 Up,” was shown on British television last year, and is now running at the I.F.C. Center.

I’ve forgotten when I first encountered the series, though it was probably the broadcast of “21 Up,” which aired on British television in 1977, when I was ten. I haven’t missed an episode since, and I’ve watched most of them—including the earlier ones—two or three times—often enough so that certain phrases and scenes stay with me, like familiar lines of poetry or passages from a favorite novel. The plaintive response of seven-year-old Paul, a worried boarder at a grim-looking charity school, to a question about whether he wants to get married eventually has, in my house, become shorthand for the tragicomic trials of domestic relations. And when twenty-one-year-old Tony, the working-class would-be jockey turned taxi-driver, declares to Apted, “All I understand is dogs, prices, girls, knowledge, roads, streets, squares, mum and dad, and love. That’s all I understand; that’s all I want to understand,” it doesn’t just sound a bit like Keats; it makes as much sense, in its own way.

The age gap between me and the subjects of the program—once enormous—has diminished. Fifty-six doesn’t seem quite far enough off these days. But I have always regarded the characters on the “Up” series as a monitory advance team, like older siblings, forever one step ahead of me on the path through adolescence, the onset of adulthood, and, now, the long, narrowing years of middle age. These days, I’m the mother of a seven-year-old, and I see the series in light of my son’s own unimaginable future, catching glimpses of him in the children on the screen, and hoping for his growing happiness as I’ve hoped, sometimes seemingly in vain, for theirs.

The series began with a political agenda. Taking the Jesuit maxim “Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” it suggested that the prospects of the participants were determined by the class into which they were born. To a certain extent, this turned out to be true, particularly for those participants belonging to the social and educational élite. John, the prep-school boy, became a barrister, while his classmate Andrew became a solicitor. (The third child from their privileged group, Charles, dropped out of the series after appearing as a restive malcontent on “21 Up.” Charles eventually became a documentary filmmaker, and I can’t be the only viewer to fantasize about the film he could make, if he wanted to, about participating in Apted’s experiment.)

Less predictable were the fates of the working-class and middle-class characters. Lynn, who thought she’d work at Woolworths, established a career as a children’s librarian, while her classmate Sue became a university administrator, despite never having been near a university—or even attending grammar school. After the first two episodes, no viewer could have anticipated that Neil, the charismatic would-be astronaut, would develop chronic mental-health problems by twenty-one, or that, by twenty-eight, he would be homeless. Nor could viewers have predicted the dignified and moving way in which he has rebuilt his life in the decades since. Neil’s illness—a gift to Apted, if a trial to Neil—shows the limitations of the original show’s simplistic sociopolitical premise, and it underscores the series’ actual accomplishment: revealing the gradual development of ordinary lives in all their extraordinary complexity. As my husband put it, after we left the theatre the other night, the series began like Zola, but, half a century in, it touches Proust.

The series has been described as a precursor to reality television, but its participants were too young to give reliable consent at the outset, and they did not seek celebrity. Most, if not all, seem to regard their participation—permitting viewers to see their lives, judge their accomplishments, and witness their insecurities and failures—as a sacrifice for the greater good. No one watching is likely to envy them their calling. But the series also obliquely reveals another evolution, that of Apted himself. In episodes from the seventies and eighties, his questions about political conditions in England sometimes seem crudely ideological. He can be unbearably patronizing toward his subjects, particularly the working-class women, while he sets his more affluent participants up to look ludicrous, as in a scene showing John foxhunting at twenty-one.

Apted’s subjects were less willing to be subjected as they grew older, and Apted, like an author of a realist novel whose invented characters start to make their own demands upon the direction of his plot, has been obliged to bend the series’ conceit to his participants’ reality. In “35 Up,” it was disclosed that John is descended from the first Prime Minister of Bulgaria and has strong ties to that struggling country. In “56 Up,” he reveals that he was orphaned at nine; brought up by a single working mother, he went to Oxford on a scholarship. None of these facts negate the foxhunting, but they do demand a more nuanced interpretation of John’s fogeyish embrace of the pursuits of the English landed gentry. To his credit, Apted has shown participants arguing back against the show’s premise and against his own prejudices. One of the most exhilarating moments in the series occurs in “49 Up,” when Jackie, an unemployed, single mother of three who grew up in the East End of London, rounds on Apted, castigating him for his decades of underestimating her. Apted’s implied humility is ultimately, if belatedly, Jackie’s vindication.

Apted has said that the subject with whom he most closely identifies is Nick, the precocious farm boy who goes to Oxford and thereafter moves to America with dreams of making an advance in nuclear physics, only to abandon his research and become a university professor. Apted left England for Hollywood and, like Nick, married and divorced and remarried. But the story of intelligent, ambitious, thoughtful Nick is a story about failed aspiration and the dawning, mortal recognition of limitation. While apparently content—or at least not discontent—with his work and his second marriage, Nick has not done what he once meant to do. I wonder whether Apted—who, beyond the singular accomplishment of the “Up” series, has made films that have been successful, workmanlike, and unremarkable—feels anything of Nick’s sense of resignation, too. And this would be the point to acknowledge that, having moved from a provincial English town to America by way of Oxford, I feel my own painful kinship with Nick, who, in “56 Up,” articulates the loss experienced after self-imposed exile: the sense of distance from the beloved landscape of one’s birth; the remaining visits, so few as to be counted on one hand, that will be made back home to one’s elderly parents in decline.

It’s Nick who, in “56 Up,” best sums up Apted’s achievement. The self he sees represented on the screen, changing and growing over time, isn’t him, exactly, he suggests. His story, like that of any individual, is too broad to convey with a twenty-minute segment every seven years. But, Nick says, it’s a portrait of someone. “It’s a picture of everyman,” he says. “It’s how a person—any person—how they change.” He’s right, of course. This is a series about us as much as it is a series about the individual fates of the children plucked from their classrooms in the early sixties. Apted’s achievement, it turns out, has been quite different from that which the project originally proposed. Rather than revealing the pressures of exterior social forces, the series shows the gradual inner development of empathy and sympathy—on the part of its participants and on the part of its maker. It demands the same enlarging sympathy from its audience. It’s strenuous viewing. It insists that we care, deeply, as we watch Apted and his subjects grow up, and as we follow them down.